Women's stuff!

This morning I listened to someone reading material by the writer Maggie O'Farrell on BBC Radio 4. It seems that she has written about a number of near death experiences she has had. This one concerned childbirth. Because she had suffered from some kind of encephalitis as a child she had been told that if she ever had children she would be unable to give birth naturally as there was some muscle damage. She would not be able to push and would need a caesarian section. So when she was pregnant for the first time she told her doctor about this on one of her early visits to the hospital. The doctor referred the matter to a senior consultant who dismissed it out of hand, accusing her of being soft, afraid of a little pain, influenced by "celebrities" who had given birth by section, of following a fashion trend; in short he refused to consider it at all. She should go into labour and push, like everyone else. And when the day came, she went into labour but she did not dilate and never experienced the urge to push. She was in labour for three days, the baby was in distress and she ended up with a section. As a result of complications she almost died!

Now this is interesting because I was planning to write about a couple things I had found recently on the subject of childbirth. First there was the eminently sensible Hadley Freeman, commenting on how it is acceptable nowadays to talk about the abortion you had in your early twenties when you were busy with your career and a baby would be inconvenient. People react with understanding and little condemnation. On the other hand, she said, if you "confessed" to having had an elective caesarian, you faced approbation, disapproval and general harrumphing for not having given birth "naturally". Here's a link to her article.

The other was an obituary for Prunella Briance, who founded the Natural Childbirth Trust, and who died recently aged 91. She was inspired in part by a doctor who, way back in the early twentieth century, had been so impressed by a young woman who refused pain relief during delivery that he wrote a book with the aim of giving women the information they needed to combat their fear of delivery and thus endure the inevitable pain more productively. Prunella Briance's own experience of childbirth was not good and she felt much of this was down to women not being in control and not fully knowing what was going on. And so the National Childborth Trust came about. Here is a link to that article. 

Now I have had a number of discussions, mostly with my daughter, about this whole "natural birth" business. And the difficulty or otherwise of breastfeeding. Her generation seem to have found it all more difficult than mine did. Or perhaps they just complain more and more publicly. We didn't have Mumsnet. We had to network in a different way.

Back in the late 70s my friends and I were all busy making babies and almost all of us went to NCT classes and found them really useful. As was the support network for breastfeeding and those early months when looking after a new baby is rather daunting. (Better than Mumsnet? Possibly.) Maybe we were lucky but around here we had very sensible NCT teachers and counsellors, who never suggested that we were failures if we "gave in" and asked for pain relief. Of course, there was encouragement to do without; what relieves the mother's pain also makes the baby sluggish. But it was never really put across as some kind of test of how good a woman you were. We knew there were fanatics who thought that. We took them with a pinch of salt!

Listening to our children's friends talk about childbirth, I get the feeling that the pressure is greater nowadays to prove you can do it "properly". All these high-achieving young women having babies in their mid- to late- thirties are being made to feel that they need to achieve this as well. What a shame.

After all, as sensible Hadley points out, the whole thing is really all about getting healthy baby into the world!